During the week of 3 June 2013, Dr. James Ianelli convened an AD-Model Buidling (ADMB) developer's workshop at the University of Washington, Seattle, Washington. This annual workshop serves to focus advancement of the ADMB software in a number of ways—one by bringing together expert developers but also by introducing new scientists to this type of activity.
ADMB presently is at the core of arguably a very large fraction of fisheries stock assessment modeling activities both nationally and worldwide (see map inset). The software has also gained application into non-fisheries areas. Proudly, NOAA is one of the strongest supporters of the software developments, and several scientists from different Science Centers remain actively involved in improving and continuing to advance the software.
Discussions and activities during the week focused on the technical side of ADMB development with goals to continue to make the software easier to use (and contribute to as developers) and to enhance capabilities. These capabilities include developing protocols where models can be written more easily to take advantage of many processors simultaneously (multi-threading) to increase the speed of estimation (both of the point estimates but also the uncertainty).
Drs. Teresa A'mar (AFSC) along with Carey McGilliard and Athol Whitten (AFSC/UW post-docs) contributed to the workshop. Scientists from three other NMFS Science Centers, Canada, the University of Hawaii, the University of Washington, and the International Halibut Commission contributed to the activity.